Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
In Defense of Quarantine
Posted on April 29, 2003 in Crosstalk Medical Ethics Social Justice
UPDATE: 7 December 2016: In retrospect, my panic about SARS seems unwarranted. Not so long ago, the issue was Ebola, a more serious illness by far. Careful use of quarantine prevented it from getting out among the general public.
Dawn broke somewhere in the Mojave Desert. The train rolled off the Cajon Pass into San Bernardino. When I opened my eyes, my mother looked at me strangely and started unbuttoning my shirt. She gasped and buttoned it up again straight-away. As we pulled into the station at San Bernardino, she had whispered to my father who’d come to pick us up. They drove me straight home. A few hours later, I was at the doctor getting her diagnosis confirmed: I had the measles.
A few bloggers (the most recent being Annie; Jeremy has weighed in on the subject as well) are concerned because of the measures being taken to isolate those stricken with SARS. They draw parallels to the Patriot Act, political repression in China, and similar mad measures of governments around the world. The concern is understandable and I blame the misunderstanding less on these fellow bloggers of mine than I do on those political figures who have treated the products of the mind as viruses and attempted to prevent their spread by imprisonment.
Unlike Annie and maybe Jeremy, I grew up at the tail end of an era when communicable diseases spread like the flame from a match dropped on a cotton sheet. Quarantines were never meant to keep people from expressing themselves. You were kept for a specific purpose, which was to prevent other people from picking up your germs. The isolation — unless you happened to be a typhoid carrier — ended when the disease ran its course and you were no longer contagious. It was especially important in the days before antibiotics. We’ve seen far less of it now because we have antibiotics and vaccines to curb the menaces that lurk in our lungs and on our skin.
Right now, SARS is a disease to be watched. Thanks to the efforts of the World Health Organization, we’re able to track the progress of the disease around the world and contain it in the places where it pops up. Quarantine is an important part of the program: carriers of the disease, willing or resisting, are kept away from potential victims. Because of this, we may never see SARS become the population killer that it could be. And some of us will wonder if this was all necessary.
It’s better to pay this price now before SARS becomes the earth’s World Trade Center which happened because George W. Bush and John Ashcroft called off modest measures to keep the minions of Osama Bin Laden under surveillance. I, for one, would give a few days of my freedom to move about for the sake of the children across the street. This is the one, rare case when I would even agree that those who are unwilling should be taken captive and held — provided they have the disease and provided they are released when the sickness runs its course.
When politicians do crazy things in the name of “security”, it makes it hard, very hard, for people to accept and understand this kind of necessity. Call the suspicion of measures to contain SARS understandable if misguided: call what is being done to freedom of thought in America and China misguided and evil.
A Chinese visitor to the #travel channel at irc.icq.com told us that students were restricted to the University for the Labor Day holiday (May 1 in the world outside of America) to prevent the spread of SARS.
A more insidious intrusion into health matters here in the United States is investigated by Andrea the Shameless Agitator at Acts of Conscience.
